Questioning Nineteenth-Century Assumptions about Knowledge, II

Description

During the last few decades, the fundamental premises of the modern view of knowledge have been increasingly called into question. Questioning Nineteenth-Century Assumptions about Knowledge II: Reductionism provides an in-depth look at the debates surrounding the status of "reductionism" in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities in detailed and wide-ranging discussions among experts from across the disciplines. Whether or not there is or should be a basic epistemological stance that is different in the sciences and humanities, and whether or not such a stance as exemplified by the approach to reductionism is changing, has enormous consequences for all aspects of knowledge production. Featured are an overview and subsequent discussion of this pervasive concept in the social sciences that parses reductionism into the categories of strong social constructionism and anti-essentialism, social ontology and the apathetic actor, dualisms, and individualism. Also of interest in chapters and follow up discussions are the relations between essentialism and emergentism in complex systems theory.
Participants
Illustrations

Foreword
Immanuel Wallerstein

Introduction
Richard E. Lee

S E S S I O N I

Reductionism in Social Science
Andrew Sayer

Discussion

S E S S I O N I I

Emergence and Complex Systems
Evan Thompson

Discussion

S E S S I O N I I I

Reduction and Emergence in Complex Systems
Jean Petitot

Discussion

S E S S I O N I V

Organizers’ Opening Remarks
Immanuel Wallerstein
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
Aviv Bergman

Discussion
Index

Sujets

• Sociology
• History of philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 08 octobre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438434421
• Langue: English

Extrait

FERNAND BRAUDEL CENTER STUDIES IN HISTORICAL SOCIAL SCIENCE
 
Series Editor: Richard E. Lee
 
The Fernand Braudel Center Studies in Historical Social Science will publish works that address theoretical and empirical questions produced by scholars in or through the Fernand Braudel Center or who share its approach and concerns. It specifically seeks to promote works that contribute to the development of the world-systems perspective engaging a holistic and relational vision of the world—the modern world-system—implicit in historical social science, which at once takes into consideration structures (long-term regularities) and change (history). With the intellectual boundaries within the sciences/ social sciences/humanities structure collapsing in the work scholars actually do, this series will offer a venue for a wide range of research that confronts the dilemmas of producing relevant accounts of historical processes in the context of the rapidly changing structures of both the social and academic world. The series will include monographs, colloquia, and collections of essays organized around specific themes .
 
 

VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES:
 
Questioning Nineteenth-Century Assumptions about Knowledge I: Determinism Richard E. Lee, editor
Questioning Nineteenth-Century Assumptions about Knowledge II: Reductionism Richard E. Lee, editor
Questioning Nineteenth-Century Assumptions about Knowledge III: Dualism Richard E. Lee, editor

Questioning Nineteenth-Century Assumptions about Knowledge
II
R E D U C T I O N I S M
 
Edited by Richard E. Lee
Foreword by Immanuel Wallerstein
 

FERNAND BRAUDEL CENTER STUDIES IN HISTORICAL SOCIAL SCIENCE

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
©2010 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Diane Ganeles Marketing by Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Questioning nineteenth-century assumptions about knowledge / edited by Richard E. Lee ; foreword
by Immanuel Wallerstein.
v. — (The Fernand Braudel Center studies in historical social science series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: v. 1. Determinism
ISBN 978-1-4384-3441-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-3440-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Knowledge, Theory of. I. Lee, Richard E., 1945–
 
BD161.Q47 2010
121—dc22                                                                                      2010004836
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

PARTICIPANTS
AVIV BERGMAN —Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, NY
JEAN-PIERRE DUPUY —Ecole Polytechnique [GRISE], Paris; and Stanford University, Stanford, CA
JOÃO CARAÇA —Director of Science, Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal
PAUL CILLIERS —Philosophy, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa
PAUL DUMOUCHEL —School of Core Ethics and Frontier Sciences, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan
ERIC GOLES —President, CONYCIT, Santiago, Chile
N. KATHERINE HAYLES —English, University of California, Los Angeles, CA
JEAN PETITOT —Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France
ISTVAN REV —History, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary
ANDREW SAYER —Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
ULLICA SEGERSTRALE —Sociology, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL
EVAN THOMPSON —Philosophy, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN —Sociology, Yale University, New Haven, CT
RICHARD E. LEE (Scientific Secretary)—Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY

ILLUSTRATIONS
3.1        Comparison between drawings of visual hallucinations and mathematical models
3.2        The receptive profile of a simple orientation cell of V1. 1: schematized structure. 2 and 3: mathematical model. 4: empirical recording
3.3        The functional architecture of the area V1 of a cat
3.4       Left: The association field of Field, Hayes and Hess experiments .
            Right: Curved Kanizsa illusory contours
3.5        Some examples of eigenmodes in V
3.6        The retinotopic conformal map, mapping the retina on V1
3.7        Lines in V1 correspond to spiral on the retina
3.8        Klüver's planforms are isomorphic to eigenmodes of the bifurcated solutions of the neural network in the synaptic weights of which the functional architecture of V1 has been encoded
3.9        Other examples of eigenmodes
3.10      Other examples of eigenmodes
3.11      The result of the tournament between 12 strategies, each represented by 100 agents
3.12      Nowak and May's example of Tit for Tat strategy, displayed spatially
3.13      The temporal evolution of the subpopulations ( c, c ) and ( d, d ) of figure 3.12
3.14      For b = 2.1 and a 50%–50% InitConfig, defection d dominates immediately and totally
3.15      The temporal evolution of the subpopulations (c, c) and (d, d) of figure 3.14
3.16      For b = 1.85 in the critical interval and a 50%–50% InitConfig, the behavior ( d, d ) begins to dominate; next ( c, c ) begins to reconquer ground by expanding from nuclei that resisted the initial extermination, but multi-scale nested clusters of c and d appear and expand in a fractal structure
3.17      The temporal evolution of the subpopulations (c, c) and (d, d) of figure 3.16
3.18      Evolution of the system for b = 1.85 (inside the critical interval) and an InitConfig reduced to a single ( d, d ) in a purely ( c, c ) population

FOREWORD
T his volume is one of three in a series devoted to the theme: “Questioning Nineteenth-Century Assumptions about Knowledge.” The project was organized by Jean-Pierre Dupuy (a philosopher of science affiliated with the Centre de Recherche en Epis témologie Appliquée, Paris), Aviv Bergman (an evolutionary biologist who directs the Aviv Bergman Laboratory at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, New York), and Immanuel Wallerstein (a sociologist, formerly Director of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University and currently a Senior Research Scholar at Yale University). Its Scientific Secretary was Richard E. Lee, the current Director of the Fernand Braudel Center.
The underlying premise of this series of conferences was that, in the last thirty years, scholars in all fields have been raising into question some of the fundamental premises of the modern view of knowledge, as it had been developing for at least five centuries and, in particular, as it was codified in the nine teenth century. It was at that time that a view of knowledge that was determinist, reductionist, and dualist came to predominate the intellectual scene, and found parallel expression in the natural sciences/mathematics, the social sciences, and the humanities/philosophy.
This consensus, once very widely shared, was seriously challenged in all three arenas in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The object of the series of conferences was to explore the degree of convergence of the questioning in the three arenas, which has often been clouded by the fact that different terminologies are being used in many cases.
The format we used was the following. We sought to have sixteen participants: the three organizers and the scientific secretary; three persons to prepare background papers for that meeting, coming respectively from the natural sciences/mathematics, the social sciences, and the humanities/philosophy; and nine others, three from each of the three arenas, who participated in the debate. The only persons who were present at all three meetings were the three organizers and the scientific secretary. Each meeting had four sessions of a half-day in length: one each to discuss the background paper in each of the three arenas, and a fourth in which the three organizers led an integrative discussion. We found this formula to be very productive.
We are publishing three volumes, o